Cube Cobra

Release 1.4.0

The last few months I've been chipping away at some pretty major overhauls. Most of these changes don't have major ramifications for user experience on CubeCobra, but significantly improve developer experience for contributing, maintaining, and adding new features. These changes did involve a major data migration. In the past I have accomplished this with downtime, but this time I decided to raise our standards and enable a dual writes strategy during the migration, to allow for a zero downti...

Release 1.3.0

Another four months went by since we cut our last official release. The work described here has been implemented and deployed incrementally over that time, but we wanted to take a moment to summarize the changes in one place. Most of these changes you probably are already used to for months, but some of them were just rolled out this week! I wanted to take a moment specifically to shoutout the two developers who have contributed the most to this release: 2025-10-02 15:38:18 +0000 UTC View Post

Update 1.2.0

Since the last update four months ago, we've been working on a wide range of features and improvements for CubeCobra. In the last update I talked about opening up avenues for new projects to benefit from CubeCobra with new integration points, and today I'm really excited to announce two new integrations, in addition to a couple new large features.

The first integration is with a new project, still in open beta, called Snapdrafter. Snapdrafter is currently only available as an android ap...

1.1.0 Release

When I first launched CubeCobra, I had a vision that one site could house every single tool that you would need to build a Cube, and that's what I attempted to build. As the site grew, and new features were added, we were in a spot where we had some good core functionality and a handful of features that quite honestly didn't work too well. Multiplayer drafting was the biggest offender here. I tried my best to design a reliable system, but it was riddled with many extremely difficult to solve ...

1.0.0 Release

Hi everyone, it's been just about a year since our last update. In that time I have done some small bugfixes here and there, but haven't made any big changes that warranted release notes. Today, I do have a major update to announce, an I'm calling it version 1.0.0, rather than sticking with our previous version scheme. The biggest change you'll see is a sweeping overhaul of the frontend. This is because we migrated away from Bootstrap and to Tailwind CSS. This change was made to make the fron...

Update 6.0

It's been a while since our last official update, but I'm very happy to announce the results of an end of year bug squashing endeavor. There are a number of bugfixes that have been long-overdue, and I've tried to address to largest impact ones with this update. Special thanks to all the contributors who helped with this update, this is not something I can do alone easily and the extra help is very appreciated.

Some of the larger bugfixes include an issue where drafts would end early. We...

Update 5.9

Thank you for your patience during our downtime! This migration was important for the long term maintainability of Cube Cobra. We've been working on this update diligently since the last release, 9 months ago. As of writing this post, you will immediately notice that all of your old decks are missing, and that card analytics (like top cards) have no history, don't panic! This is going to take another few days to be migrated, and I didn't want that to be a blocker to use the website. I'll keep...

Update 5.8

Today's the big day! It's our first major update since 5.7, seven months ago! I promise that the wait was well worth it though, as this is the update that brings multiplayer drafting to CubeCobra. All drafts on CubeCobra will use the new model, even singleplayer drafts. These drafts bring completely brand new draft bots - with the only major downside that we no longer support users drafting while not being logged on. The reasons for this is somewhat complicated, but the brief is that anonymou...

Update 5.7

Today, we're releasing a batch of changes in order to fix a bug that was created by the "Heads I Win, Tails You Lose" secret lair, that caused our automated card update script to fail to import new cards from Scryfall. This should be fixed, and you can expect missing cards to be propagated up to a day after this announcement.

We definitely are in a bit of a lull for development of new features, and I wanted to give a special thanks to Vaasa (on discord, lunakv on GitHub) for implementin...

Release 5.6

Thank you for your patience during our downtime. This maintenance was necessary to enable us to help build new features that are still in the pipeline.

It's been a considerable amount of time since our last release, and while we don't have any game-changing new features to bring to you today, we do have some significant quality of life features and bugfixes.

The biggest new feature is an automated featured cube rotation, for 'Coiling Oracle' level patrons. You can now add your cub...

Release 5.5

We have a small release for you today, but a significant one. I want to preface this with a bit of context. I love working on Cube Cobra, and it makes me incredibly happy to see how far we've grown. I am dedicated to doing the best I can to provide the best possible service, and this would not be possible without the generosity of our patrons. But unfortunately, despite our successful Patreon campaign, we haven't been able to consistently meet our hosting costs, even between Patreon, affiliat...

Release 5.4

In today's release, we've mostly fixed a few critical issues with the site around top cards and cube searching. The previous paradigms for both these pages turned out to not be scalable, and poorly utilized our database. Top Cards has been reworked to not even touch the database now, by utilizing some cached information, and should work perfectly. Cube search has been reworked completely as well, using the keyword indexing capabilities of our database. I'll still keep a close eye on cube sear...

Release 5.3

Thank you for being patient during our downtime. This was a necessary measure to perform a data migration to enable some of our new features, help keep hosting costs low, and to lower the amount of data needed to be loaded for various activities.

With this release we updated cubes to only have 2 IDs. Previously cubes had a random long id, a random short id, and possibly a custom ID. We combined the short ID and custom ID so now when you define a custom ID for your cube it'll replace the...

Update 5.2

We have a very exciting release tonight, with a couple big new features. The first thing I want to talk about is something that's been very widely requested that for the longest time I didn't think was worth building up until recently, and that's per-cube draft analytics and Elo. The difficulty with this, is that in order to have draft data be statistically significant, at least thousands of drafts of a cube need to be done, possibly more, depending on the size of the cube. So, what I decided...

Update 5.1

Surprise! We weren't planning on having another release for at least another week - but I needed to push a tiny hotfix to fix an issue where importing some Strixhaven cards decided to crash the server! I figured, I'm doing a small release and deployment anyway, I might as well give you all the features that we've finished up since the latest release.

The biggest feature in this release closed out an incredibly old feature request: customizable basics! Now you should be able to select wh...

Cube Cobra Update 5.0

Tonight's release brings a new feature that's been highly requested, but not necessarily in the way that you might expect. This is addressing the ubiquitous request of being able to sort a cube "alphabetically". The reason it's taken us up until now to have a solution is because when we sort a cube, it's not really an 'ordered' sort, it just groups cards into respective categories. The primary sort you're familiar with sorts the cards into columns, and the secondary sort sorts cards into row ...

Release 4.9

We have a surprise release today as a follow up to the downtime we had last weekend. For those of you that missed it, here's a quick recap: we rely on Scryfall's bulk download to populate our card definition files. We do this every 24 hours, and for some reason Scryfall's CDN had a single bad file, and this caused our daily update to fail. Unfortunately, this failure resulted in all of our servers failing to function. The temporary solution was to include a static card definition with the dep...

Update 4.8

It's been a while since the last release, and I think it's safe to say that we've completely fallen off of our alternating week release schedule. For me personally, I haven't been able to dedicate the time to some of the larger features that I have been wanting to add for a while, but hopefully this will turn back around soon. We do have several large updates related to drafting in progress, that are not quite ready to release yet. Please stay tuned for more news regarding those updates. And ...

Release 4.7

The big picture goals right now are improving service availability, and working towards multiplayer drafting. Todays update solves several issues related to the first goal, and makes some progress towards the second goal. I would like to have a prototype of multiplayer drating working sometime in January - but life is so unpredictable these days it's possible that goal is incredibly optimistic.

This release brings several improvements to our filter syntax, adding in even more functional...

Release 4.6

Tonight's release is quite small, we've added a few quality of life features and fixed several bugs that have affected many users.

New Features:

• Hybrid mana symbols can be written reversed in markdown, {B/R} and {R/B} will both work, for example
• Added 'title' attribute to deck preview links, full name can be seen by hovering over the link
• Add option to disable draft notifications by cube

Bugfixes:

• Fixed an issue where CSV export woul...
  2020-11-22 01:24:12 +0000 UTC View Post

Release 4.5

Our update schedule has fallen to the wayside a bit, but today I have an update rich with many bugfixes. I've also added a new filter for layout, so now you can do "layout:transform" to view your transform cards, or "layout:adventure" to view your adventure cards. You can also now use "is:dfc", "is:mdfc", "is:transform", and "is:meld". I've added an image override for the back side of cards, so you can now show off your DFC alters! I've added a new dropdown to the menu bar to quickly access a...

Release 4.4

First off, my apologies for having our update schedule slowed down a bit. This is mostly due to my graduate school semester starting, and my time is a bit more constrained.

This release contains some new markdown tools. and some useful bugfixes. Some of these changes were hot-fixed throughout last month, but I'll include those changes in this blog, for the sake of having a cleaner dev blog trail.

But... The real exciting feature this release brings is a feature that has been very ...

Cube Cobra Release 4.3

I am so very excited for this update to finally arrive. We are now introducing a content hub on Cube Cobra. This is a place where users can post and view Articles, Podcasts, and Videos. On that note, I've written up an article going over the new set for cube, you can check it out here: https://cubecobra.com/content/article/5f5b8eeccc79641050eb72b4

If you're interested in s...

Cube Cobra Release 4.2

If you're not familiar with Cube Cobra, we're an open source cube management website with a very passionate development team. We update the site every two weeks and make sure we make the changes most requested by the community. You can check it out here: https://cubecobra.com/

Today's release brings a major rework with how we handle commenting. I wanted commenting to be more engaging, and little more utilized, a...

Release 4.1

The timing of this release is a bit odd, mostly because of a mistake I made, and launching early just happened to be the best way to fix this mistake.

I just finished up a big update to card pages, adding a ton of content. Card search has now been added, you can find it under 'browse'. The new card pages now show the full legality of the cards, charts for elo, price (multiple currencies), and play rate (multiple cube types) over time. Right now the data is a bit sparse, but...

Release 4.0

I'm very excited to bring you this release today! I needed to skip the last release, as I was (still am really) in the process of moving to a new place, and I didn't have the extra time to prepare a proper release. I'm back to (almost) fully operational now, so you can expect us to resume the normal schedule. You may have also noticed a TCGPlayer advertisement banner, or a banner displaying a donation or merchandise link. This was more a experiment to see if I could help cover th...

Update 3.9

Tonight's update is our first release following our migration to DocumentDB. For those unaware, you may have noticed some severe latency issues the past week; I've been pulling some late nights to iron out all the kinks related to this migration. You should be able to feel an immediate improvement, our average latency has gone from 600ms to around 100ms! In addition to the performance improvements, this migration will help with stability, scaling, and make my job of managing the ...

Cube Cobra Release 3.8

Tonight's release is a very exciting one. Before we get into the exciting new features, I wanted to share that I am giving away some special Cube Cobra snake tokens to all Patreons! If you are interested in receiving some tokens, you can support Cube Cobra here. Cube Cobra is almost completely funded through Patreon, and every cent of donations go directly towards server costs. We also just launched o...

Release 3.7

Today's release brings a grab bag of valuable bugfixes, and a couple new features. I understand we didn't have a release two weeks ago as we should have according to our schedule, and that this release is a bit feature light. This is mostly due to my limited bandwidth the last month due to personal commitments, and several other regular contributors were busy with other real-life issues. Regardless, we're committed building the best cube platform we can, and I can assure you I'll...

Release 3.6

Today's update brings a lot of small changes including several fixes and updates for the newly revamped cube analytics. We're still halfway done with migrating our server to our new host, but I've done a lot of optimization to the configuration to reduce the amount of downtime. I've also implemented some new logging functionality for the live server, which will greatly help us in squashing those difficult to pin down bugs. As usual, please let me know what features, old or ...